Last Dance, Last Chance Read online

  Pat Jacque screamed in alarm. The stranger wasn’t very big—but his gun was. She cut her scream short, aware of three little pairs of eyes looking at her from the living room. She didn’t want them to be frightened. The man with the gun seemed agitated, and she fought to stay calm so he wouldn’t lose control.

  The stranger asked where her husband was, and she lied, telling him that her husband was right next door at his father’s house—and that he was due home any minute.

  “You’d better leave before my husband gets home,” she warned, trying to frighten him into leaving.

  “I’ll wait,” the man said. “I need to be someplace, and he’s gonna drive me.”

  Pat’s children were afraid, and they began to sob. She asked if she could take them to their bedrooms, and the intruder agreed. But he insisted on following them down the narrow hall to be sure she wasn’t headed to a back door.

  She whispered to the children, telling them to be very quiet and not to open the bedroom door. “Everything will be all right,” she promised, although she had no way of knowing whether it would.

  Once her children were a wall away from the gun, Pat’s mind raced frantically to find a way for them all to survive. She would do whatever she had to do to keep them safe. At this point, she still hoped that she could persuade the man to leave. Maybe he would take money or whatever he wanted and just go away.

  She studied the man who held the rifle. He certainly didn’t look menacing. He looked a little like an Irish leprechaun, with fine features and big ears that stuck out. He had black hair, combed in careful waves, and he wore glasses. He was short and thin, and she wondered if she might be strong enough to actually overpower him. But she knew men were stronger than women, and she dismissed that idea quickly.

  He wore a plaid shirt and work pants, and he paced around her house, asking questions. Even though it was a cold night, he was perspiring heavily.

  The stranger asked Pat if she had a radio, and she took him to the kitchen and pointed to the small radio there. He carried it back to the living room and plugged it in next to the television set.

  He both watched and listened to the evening news broadcasts, but apparently there was nothing on that interested him. He kept turning the radio dial and switching television channels. “Something’s wrong,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. “There should have been something by now.”

  Then he looked up at Pat Jacque and said, “You screamed when I came in. You know about me, don’t you? You’ve heard about me?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said firmly. “I have no idea who you are or what you’re doing here.”

  “You know, all right.”

  “No,” she said truthfully. “I don’t know. I’ve been here with my children all day, and I haven’t had the radio on and all that’s been on the TV is cartoons. I don’t even know your name.”

  “You can call me Denny,” he said.

  She looked around the room covertly, looking for possibilities of escape. If she had to, she could take the children out through the bedroom window. But “Denny” never left her side; he stayed within a foot or so from her, constantly.

  It made her more nervous the way he kept emptying and reloading the rifle. He asked her if she knew anything about guns, and she told him she didn’t.

  “See that wall behind your head? This will make a mighty big hole in that wall. Don’t make any noise, because it’s cocked and ready.”

  Now she was more afraid. Her children weren’t really safe in their room. And she was scared to death that one of them would come out to see where she was. She prayed silently that they would obey her, this most important time of all.

  “What does your husband look like?”

  “He’s big—tall and pretty muscular. He works in construction.”

  “What kind of a car does he drive? What’s he gonna do when he comes in and finds me here in his house?”

  She lied to him about the make of car, too. Pat knew that her husband, Roy, would probably try to jump on the stranger and take the gun away from him. She was afraid of a struggle in which Roy might get shot. If he had any warning at all that Denny was inside, Roy could take him easily—but if he just walked in unaware…

  The minutes crawled by.

  Pat continued to speak gently to the gunman. It quieted him down quite a bit, and she tried to use whatever worked. He seemed very unhappy, and he told her that he had a lot of problems in his romantic life.

  “People are interfering with my life,” he said bitterly. “You can’t trust anybody.”

  He was alternately sorry for himself and threatening, and he kept glancing at the television set as if he expected some major news bulletin to flash across the screen at any moment.

  Pat’s overwhelming purpose was to get him out of her house. She didn’t want him there when Roy came in, and she could hear her children beginning to whimper. That was making him more jittery.

  Finally, Pat suggested that Denny take her car so that he wouldn’t have to wait for her husband to drive him.

  “I won’t call anyone,” she said.

  He gave her a look, and sarcastically said, “I’ll bet you won’t.”

  It rained harder, and Pat Jacque froze every time she heard the sound of a car out on the street. She longed to have her husband there to protect them, but she was so afraid he would be shot and wounded—or killed.

  And so they waited. She tried not to suggest too many alternatives for Denny because that seemed to make him antsy, too. But she took her car keys from her purse and put them where he could see them.

  Pat’s captor was telling the truth when he said that other people were interfering with his life. He had taken care of that earlier in the day and only now was beginning to panic about what he had done.

  Almost three years earlier, he had met the woman who was to become both his obsession and his frustration. Her name was Cherie Mullins*, and she was a buxom blonde in her thirties, who worked as a nurse’s aide. Denny LeeTuohmy* and Cherie Mullins were immediately attracted to each other, and early on their relationship seemed wonderful.

  Cherie and Denny began living together in April, 32 months before he crashed into Pat Jacque’s home. They took a long trip to California, and it was like a honeymoon, with no responsibilities and no worries about jobs or money. It didn’t even matter that Denny was still married to another woman and their trip couldn’t be a real honeymoon. The trouble began when they returned to regular, everyday life.

  They moved into a small cabin in a trailer park, and Cherie became the breadwinner in the household. Denny’s resistance to getting a job was one of the biggest sore points for Cherie.

  “I wanted him to get a job and be a decent, upright human being,” Cherie said later. “I wanted him to see about getting his divorce through. I told him if he ever hit me, I was finished. Then he hit me in November, and I had two broken ribs. I left that night, but then I went back for my things and he begged me to stay and I felt sorry for him, so I stayed; but only for about a week. He was using my car to date other women.”

  It was the all-too-familiar pattern of domestic violence: Denny was so pathetic when Cherie left him that she truly believed he was going to change. But a few weeks after she came back to him, he returned to his old behavior.

  What started in April as bliss ended in early December. The couple separated, and Denny moved to Seattle but continued to call Cherie every day.

  For a few weeks, Cherie moved in with her mother, Gladys Bodine, in Kent, 20 miles southeast of Seattle and not far from Maple Valley.

  But Cherie couldn’t bring herself to separate completely from Denny. Part of it was that she really did care for him, and part of it was that she felt sorry for him. But she was also afraid of him. Like many women who are hounded and stalked by men who won’t let go, Cherie made the mistake of leaving the door slightly open.

  “We were partners in a mixed-doubles bowling league, and I told Denny I woul
d continue to bowl with him on Friday nights,” Cherie recalled. “He kept calling me at work, wanting to see me, to ask how I was; sometimes he just wanted to borrow my car.

  It was Friday the 13th when Cherie had what was to be her last date with Denny. “He came out to Kent, and we went bowling,” she said. “Afterwards, he asked me to drive him into Seattle. We sat and talked in the parking lot for a long time. He wanted me to go back with him.”

  Cherie wanted to be back together, too, but she wanted things to be different. She laid down some rules. “I told him again if he’d get a job and support me, I would go back to him.”

  After she told Denny what she needed to make a relationship work, she drove him back to Seattle. Apparently, he had intended that they would return to intimacy that very night, and he was angry that he had to prove himself to her. When they were halfway to Seattle, somewhere in Tukwila, he asked Cherie to pull over and park. She agreed. “But he kept arguing, and I told him I had to get home to my mother’s house because she went to bed early and she didn’t like to have me come in late.”

  The truth was that Cherie no longer lived with her mother, but she didn’t want Denny to know the address of her new apartment. If he thought she was with her mother, he’d be lulled into believing that he could always locate her when wanted to.

  “I just didn’t want him to know where I was living.”

  Denny’s mood changed rapidly, and he turned to her and said a strange thing in a flat, monotone voice: “You won’t have to worry about your mother. You won’t have to worry about tomorrow. Neither will I. We’ll both be dead.”

  That frightened Cherie. Denny could be a lot of fun, but when he was in his depressed or angry moods, she didn’t know for sure what he might do. “I was scared then,” she remembered. “I told him I loved him and asked him how could he hurt someone who loved him, and the only one who loved him? He looked up at a hill nearby where a cross was lighted up on a church, and then he shouted, ‘Damn you God! Damn you!’”

  Then he seemed to calm down, and Cherie started the car and drove him into Seattle.

  Pat Jacque didn’t know any of Denny’s background. As far as she was concerned, she was dealing with a man who had no past at all.

  Denny was getting more nervous, pacing like a lion and pulling the curtains back more frequently to see if anyone was coming. He kept shaking his head when she begged him to take her car and leave. He didn’t trust her at all.

  And then he turned to her and said, “You will have to drive me.”

  It was a terrible decision that would have taken the wisdom of Solomon to determine. If she went with him, her children would be safe from him, at least. But then again, they were so young. She never left them alone, even to run across the street. There were so many dangerous things little kids could get into. Worse, if they wandered out to the road looking for her, they might be hit by a car coming along Wax Road. What if the house caught fire? What if they fell—or got into poisonous cleaning supplies? Mothers always worry about things like that. Most are nervous even with baby-sitters.

  But she had to get the man with the gun out of her house, and Pat prayed that Roy would be home soon. At age 7, Steve might be able to tell his father what had happened. She hoped that somehow Roy would find her.

  Wondering if she would ever see her family again, Pat Jacque stepped from the warmth of her home into the icy drizzle of December rain. Denny motioned for her to get in the driver’s seat. “You drive,” he ordered. “I’ll be right behind you.”

  The lights of her house faded quickly from her rearview mirror as Pat drove. Denny sat right behind her with the .303 aimed at the back of her head.

  Denny Tuohmy directed her precisely. “Turn here. Now here.” He knew where he wanted to go, but Pat didn’t know if they were headed for a deserted gravel pit where he was going to shoot her and kill her or were about to take off on a 150-mile drive to Canada. She kept hoping that her husband would come home and the kids would be safe. Somehow, she knew Roy would find her—if she could just stay alive.

  Cherie Mullins had heard from Denny several times on December 19 and 20. On Thursday evening, he had called her at a beauty parlor where she worked part time. It was 6:20 P.M., and she was having her hair done. It made her nervous that he always seemed to be able to track her down. He wanted to borrow her car to drive to Tacoma.

  “I told him I was busy and I needed my car. And I couldn’t drive him down, either. I almost begged him to leave me alone.”

  He did not call again that night, but at 8:30 the next morning, Friday, December 20, just as Cherie walked into the nursing home where she worked, the phone was ringing. It was Denny again. He still wanted a ride to Tacoma. He asked her again to borrow her car or to have her drive him.

  Cherie was exasperated. “I told him I was working, and not to call me at work again or I would lose my job.”

  “Is everything all right?” Denny’s voice softened as he asked her that.

  “Yes—but I’m working, Denny,” she said in a kinder tone.

  “Do you still love me?” he asked.

  “…Yes.”

  “Will you go to Tacoma with me after work?”

  “I can’t, Denny—”

  “I’ll be there anyway,” he said. She didn’t know what he meant. Would he be in Tacoma? Or was he coming to the nursing home?

  Cherie went about her Friday morning duties at work, but she got another personal call. It was her mother’s next-door neighbor.

  The woman said that all the lights in Gladys Bodine’s house were on—even the outside Christmas lights. They’d been on all night, she thought. Gladys’s car was in the driveway, and her dog was barking in the house. But no one would answer the door.

  Cherie made arrangements to leave work immediately and drove hurriedly to her mother’s home. With the help of neighbors, she tried every door. They were all locked. A neighbor finally crawled through a side window and opened the front door for Cherie.

  She walked through the quiet rooms, filled with a dread she couldn’t really explain. She tried to tell herself that her mother could take care of herself. She was only 58, and she was almost six feet tall and weighed about 180 pounds. It wasn’t likely some burglar could hurt her mother.

  “I checked the front bedroom, but my mother wasn’t there,” Cherie said. And then she saw her mother’s bedroom slipper lying in the back hallway.

  Slowly, Cherie walked toward the rear of the house. Then she saw two feet sticking out through the back bedroom door. Her mother was lying on her back next to the bed, and two jackets had been tucked around her head.

  “I pulled the jackets away from her face, but then I saw she was dead,” Cherie Mullins recalled with a sob.

  She was too shocked to try to figure out how her mother had died, and she ran to call the police.

  Cherie was afraid she knew who had killed her mother, but it was too terrible to think about. King County sheriff’s detectives worked the crime scene in Gladys Bodine’s home on that Friday, but they made sure that the local news media wouldn’t know about the case right away. For the moment, the investigators had a few hours’ head start before a suspect might be spooked by being on the news.

  Cherie Mullins didn’t hear from Denny again that Friday, but she kept remembering how he had told her that she didn’t have to worry about anything any more. She would be dead and he would be dead—but he hadn’t mentioned anything about her mother. Of course, Denny resented her mother sometimes. Gladys Bodine hadn’t found him a perfect mate for her daughter, and sometimes she warned Cherie that she was getting in too deep with him, and she could do better.

  But she’d always felt so sorry for him because he hadn’t had much happiness in his life. He and his two older brothers had been deserted by their mother and had gone from foster home to foster home. They were eventually placed in a Roman Catholic home for boys near Portland, Oregon. Denny stayed there several years before he was released to his father. That didn’t work
out either, and in his mid-teens he’d been placed in the Luther Burbank school for boys on Mercer Island, Washington. It wasn’t a reform school, but it was for teenagers who had deep problems.

  Denny ran away from Luther Burbank, and when they caught up with him, he was given a choice of going to a state reform school or joining the Army. Denny chose the Army.

  He didn’t do well in the service. He had a violent temper, and Cherie knew he’d been in trouble and had a dishonorable discharge, but she didn’t know all the details. In fact, for the Army at least, his decision was not a happy choice. Once, while he was in the stockade for being intoxicated, Tuohmy took a gun away from a guard and beat him over the head with it. When a superior officer was called, the defendant attacked him, too. Taken to a prison hospital, Tuohmy had insisted that he had no memory of the events.

  Cherie had seen his temper, but she just couldn’t believe he would hurt her mother. She didn’t want to believe that.

  Pat Jacque didn’t know about Gladys Bodine, or anything about Denny’s past. Perhaps it was better that she didn’t. After circling through the woods for a long time, they parked in back of a house—which was actually within a few miles of her own.

  Three boys came out of the house and said, “Hi, Uncle Denny. What is it? Why do you have that gun?”

  “I’m serious,” Denny told the youngsters. “I mean business.”

  Surprised, the boys looked at Pat, and she nodded and said softly, “He really means it.”

  Denny Tuohmy’s brother lived in this house, and once more Denny was set on getting to Tacoma, which was less than 20 miles away. He said he wanted his brother to drive him there. But his elder brother wasn’t home.

  For a moment, Pat Jacque felt relief. If he wanted to have his brother drive him, maybe that meant she would be allowed to go home. It was a bizarre experience. She sat there with his nephews and Denny in a silent tableau and waited. Denny balanced the high-powered rifle across his knees, ready for use.

  Pat Jacque asked if she could use the bathroom, and Denny allowed her to go, but he followed her, and kept talking to her constantly through the door to be sure that she didn’t try to escape out the window. Of course, she had thought of that, but she didn’t think she could make it out and away before he came around the house and caught her.